Sport on TV: Confused England fans fail to catcall the tune

By Giles Smith

12:01AM BST 31 Mar 2003

For once a good news story about England's travelling football supporters. A brutal minority may well have spent the weekend tossing cafe tables around in the manicured back streets of Zurich, but over the border in sunny Liechtenstein the fans were demonstrating a whole new multi-cultural humility: there was no jeering of the opposition's national anthem.

Admittedly, the national anthem of Liechtenstein is the same as the national anthem of England, except with different words and in German. They lifted the tune wholesale a few years ago, having failed to come up with one of their own.

Personally, if I'd had my pick of the world's anthems, I'd have gone for something with a bit more of a beat and some guaranteed uplift, such as La Marseillaise, but there you are.

The point is, on Saturday the English national anthem was so good they played it twice, lending a comic veneer to the traditional pre-match ceremonies and presenting a grave crisis of conscience to even the most boneheaded of England's boneheads. Because obviously you've got to boo the other side's song. But what if the other side's song is your song?

To judge from what came over the airwaves on BBC1, most of the visitors elected, after a puzzled few seconds, to swallow their whistles and join in with the hosts. And for one amazing, rainbow moment, it sounded like a Coca-Cola advert: two nations in perfect harmony. Well, almost.

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Sadly we didn't get any further close-ups of the England team during all this, but one wouldn't have put it past Emile Heskey to get involved in the singing all over again, if only out of a rich mixture of patriotism and forgetfulness. That brainbox Gareth Southgate would probably have sung the second verse.

With cultural respect and mutual tolerance the new watchwords on the ground, it was left to Gary Lineker back in the BBC studio in London to find the appropriate tone of mockery and contempt that these occasions have generally relied upon. His opening remarks about Liechtenstein included the line: "They're just a load of bankers."

Geddit? I don't know whether Lineker scripted that little rib-tickler himself, but it bore all the marks of a long and dutiful period of service beside Rory McGrath at the frontline of elegant wit which is They Think It's All Over.

David Beckham, before the game, was being a little more circumspect, referring to the match as "a potential banana skin" (whatever one of those is: possibly something to do with genetically modified fruit) and adding: "Three and half thousand fans, they'll be up for the game."

In the end one felt the ground could have held a lot more people if only someone had thought of finishing it. As it was, it appeared to be designed with Becks's personal comfort in mind, not simply because most of it was occupied by England fans, but also because one entire end was taken up by a long, white, plastic-windowed marquee, very much like the ones in which the England captain spends an awful lot of his life, if you believe the photo-spreads in OK!

In the absence of a conventional backdrop, our commentator, Barry Davies, was at least able to fill in the background for us, pointing out that Liechtenstein is the fourth-smallest country in the world and possesses the third-worst international football team in Europe.

One of their players on Saturday was a wine-grower who had spent some time out of the side last year because he was too busy with the harvest - not, to my knowledge, a distraction likely to have affected the preparations for any game of Wayne Bridge. This was not a match which should have required the postscript from Davies: "We knew they would make things difficult for us."

Then again, England had David James, whose capacity for random behaviour between the goalposts has been known to level many a steep gradient, playing field-wise. Also, the current generation of England players - though indubitably a golden one and the most gifted for years - suffer from some weird and, one suspects, ultimately ineradicable psychological flaw and could make hard work of putting on a kettle. Kieron Dyer would sprint to the sink and then forget what to do with the taps. Meanwhile Steven Gerrard would be falling into the fridge and Heskey would be out in the hall, trying, and failing, to hang up his coat.

And so it came to pass that Davies found himself, midway through the first half, uttering the immortal line: "Proving a lively customer, the local bank clerk." Only against England. Next up: Turkey, who have their own national anthem and a full complement of players undistracted by grapes. One can only hope for a major change of tune.

Also working hard to overcome questionably gifted opposition this weekend was Audley Harrison, who managed a points victory over Serbia's Ratko Draskovic, referred to by Jim Neilly on BBC1 as "this chunky fellow" who "wasn't a bad amateur in his day" but "hasn't been desperately busy".

The cynics will mock, but this was, without doubt, the best performance against a 37-year-old Balkan heavyweight with a hairy back of Harrison's career thus far. So, onwards and upwards.